Wednesday, July 27, 2011

I'd like to take a moment to highlight some of the new features that have been added to LAVA.

First off, the LAVA scheduler now has a basic UI. You can now see the status of boards, the current status of running jobs, and even click a link to see all jobs. You can't see this from the UI, but we also added support for submitting jobs for a device_type. So test jobs can now specify a target system to run on, or just a type.

Clicking on a job will show you more details about it. From here you can see things like start/finish time, the json text of the job that was submitted, and even see a stream of the live output from the job!

Bundles can now be viewed together. In LAVA, a bundle is the test results (this can come from more than one test suite), metadata, and attachments submitted to the dashboard. Bundles can be organized into streams - think of these as sort of like directories or containers that logically keep your bundles organized. Previously, you could click on a bundle stream and all you would see is a lot of individual test runs. Now what you see is a list of bundles. When you click on a bundle, you can see a summary of all test results in the bundle, with the number of passes and failures for each. The view of a bundle looks like this:

Clicking on the uuid for a specific test_run, such as posixtestsuite in this example, lets you drill down to even more detail. This view now lets you sort by any column, filter results, or change the number of rows to display per page. In practice, this means that it's really simple to alter the view so that you see just the results you care about.

Many many more good things are coming soon. The website will be getting an overhaul to highlight the big picture on the front page, and allow for categories of more interesting results (of course you'll still be able to get at the details like this by going to the dashboard). The Android team is starting to kick off tests of new images as soon as they are built, helping them with their continuous integration. It will soon be possible to inject new kernels and other components into an image before testing it. Want to know how much power is consumed while running a test? That's being worked on also. If you are interested in deploying LAVA yourself, let us know on IRC, or on the linaro-dev mailing list.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

The Linaro Validation team is pleased to announce the latest release of LAVA, for the 2011.07 milestone.

LAVA is the Linaro Automated Validation Architecture that Linaro is deploying to automate the testing of Linaro images and components on supported development boards.

One of the biggest changes you'll see this month, is the UI for the dashboard got an overhaul. You can now view entire bundles that were submitted, with the test runs organized underneath. You can also sort columns to easily see failures, filter large result tables, and change the number of items displayed per page. On the scheduler, we added a basic UI to let you see the status of boards and jobs, and also the ability to scheduler jobs by device type. The dispatcher has better error handling and preliminary support for Snowball boards added, and lava-test now streams results while the test is running. The list of bugs and blueprints that were completed for this release can be found here:https://launchpad.net/lava/+milestone/2011.07

The release pages with release notes, highlights, changelogs, and downloads can be found at:

To get a preview of what's coming next month take a look at: https://launchpad.net/lava/+milestone/2011.08 We have some good things coming soon, such as out-of-tree test support in lava-test, subscription to be notified of test results, improvements in the scheduler UI, and the website will be getting a facelift to give a make current testing and results more visible.

Updated packages will be available from the linaro-validation ppa soon.